Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Saturday, April 11, 2009

She Finally Broke Me

I give up. Megan McArdle wins. The sheer volume, the depth, breadth and width of her mendacious, immoral stupidity, has finally overwhelmed my ability to process and fight back. I went dumpster diving again in McArdle's archives and found a post about school vouchers that was so disgusting that I almost can't respond. I certainly can't fight it with the vigor it deserves.

Forgive me--I'm about to get testy again--but this thread on 11D really does seem to me to showcase in stunning technocolor the moral bankruptcy of voucher opponents who have pulled their own kids out of failing inner city schools. They have no good answer for why their choice is morally worthy, but vouchers are horrifying; their response to the deep need of kids in failing schools is a slightly gussied up version of "screw you, I've got mine." Their children's future, you see, is an infinitely precious resource that trumps their principles of distributional justice and community solidarity, but they cannot imagine putting the futures of poorer, darker skinned children ahead of sacred principles such as "Thou shalt not allow children to attend schools run by the Catholic Church" and "Supporting the public schools (even when they suck)". I could do a better job arguing against school vouchers.

And she does. McArdle enumerates the arguments against school vouchers and responds to them. Here are a few:

Vouchers don't work. This is the best argument against school vouchers. But it's still not very strong. For one thing, the studies that show this are small, and often funded by the teacher's unions.

And the studies for them are always funded by voucher supporters. If you read the voucher posts at the Corner and check up on their sources, as I did, they went back to a couple of groups--one founded by Sam Walton, who has a vested interest in an uneducated underclass, and some guy selling property in inner cities.

Voucher advocates are total hypocrites too, because why don't they start private vouchers, huh? Bet you never thought of that! Actually, we did, my love, and thanks for giving me an opening to plug the Children's Scholarship Fund, my charity of choice. If you support vouchers, you should be supporting their amazing work.

That's Walton's group, you moron. You donated money to one of the richest people in the world so he could fight against educating the poor.

I don't want my tax dollars used to pay for religious education. Waaaaaaah.

So much for church v. state.

She says in comments that vouchers won't drive up tuition, although she also says that government loans to college students drive up tuition. And she discusses her private school and how she was better educated there than any good suburban school. Although she's also told us she had a 2.9-something GPA and would have flunked out of Penn without intervention.

Ugh. I give up. Too many stupid, greedy immoral people in this world of ours. It's a zombie movie, and we're outnumbered and out of ammo. Maybe we deserve the ruin we've unleashed upon ourselves.

And make no mistake--for four years I read that this economic crash was coming, and it did. If the people I read were right--and they mostly have been so far--it is going to get a hundred times worse than this. I never think about that because it's too frightening, but I'm beginning to think that it might be the only way we wise up.

4 comments:

clever pseudonym
said...

Can't you just see Megan and all of her elitist wonk friends sitting around in some fashionable DC bar sipping appletinis, getting in a pissing contest over who had the most expensive education? At the end, they could toast and call it a draw, since they all agree in the end that they're better than most people.

Okay, I went to the school that is now vying with Matt Yglesias' alma mater for the title of "Most expensive private school in New York City". It gave me a terrific education, better than that received by any of the kids from expensive suburban public schools with whom I went to college.

In other words, "I am smarter than everyone I went to college with." She doesn't have a modest bone in her body, does she?

What I really, really loathe about McMegan is her cute little "And what else have you learned on your visit to our planet?" rejoinder / cliche that she loooooooooooooves so much. It makes me want to do violence.